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John Doyle, artistic director of the Classic Stage Company, is a purist.
Audiences will listen more closely, triggering our powers of imagination.
Thats the theory, anyway, one that worked in his spare Broadway stagings ofThe Color PurpleandSweeneyTodd.
When the witches ask When shall we three meet again, the wyrd sisters actually number eight.
(Girls, its so important to take care of your passage to remorse.)
What does that deliberate perversity get you?
It gets you a company that looks and sounds adrift.
In a short showShakespeares briefest tragedy cut even further to an hour and 40 minutesthe time drags by.
The actors have few ways to reclaim energy in a world so relentlessly enervated and untethered.
They can be loud, so there are some of those Intense Running Entrances too common in bad Shakespeare.
And they can flap their blankets.
Banquo (Erik Lochtefeld) wears his like a scarf, Lenny Kravitzstyle.
The amount of blanket business grows ridiculous.
Macbeth as Linus: Something sulky this way comes.
Many of these performers have been strong elsewhere.
Bowers was a wonderful Yelena in the Chekhov riffLife Sucksearlier this year.
But in dramas, his gifts as a director dont match his ideas.
Okay, Macbeth, youre not wrong.
But in a play, surely we can hope for more than that?
Life seems under control for the up-and-coming Joy (Bisserat Tseggai).
The women seem to know something Joy doesnt.
A pregnancy rises and subsides.
Are they the same thing?
But in memory it takes on a kind of retrospective force.
Yet it also explains why it leaves a lasting impression of vigor and promise.
But there are treasures in the secondary characters who break into this central melodrama.
Eleven years ago, Ashton set them down; they seem to have walked in from life itself.
And you remember them, even as the other noisier aspects fall away.
